Tag: Docker

How many times have you encountered a situation where the software built on one platform doesn’t work on another platform? It is a very expensive affair to ensure that your software works on all the platforms (Mobile, Tablets, PC and so on). This is one of the crucial problems which Docker helps you to resolve but this is not it. There is much more to Docker which we will explore as we move in my upcoming blogs.

Docker is a container management service or a tool which is designed to help developers to deploy and run applications by using containers. It ensures that the code will behave the same regardless of environment/platform.

Key components of a Docker

Docker File – A dockerfile is a text document that contains series of all the commands a user a make use of to create a Docker Image. The Docker images are automatically built by reading the instructions from a dockerfile.

Docker Image – It’s a lightweight snapshot of a virtual machine. It is essentially an application with all its requirements and dependencies (read-only copy of OS libraries, application libraries etc.). When you run a Docker image, you get a Docker container. Once a Docker image is created, it guarantees to run on any Docker platform. These can be retrieved to create a container in any environment.

Docker Registry – A Docker image can also be stored at online repository called Docker hub. You can also store your image in this cloud repository (https://hub.docker.com/). You can also save these images to your version control system.

Docker Container – A Docker container is nothing but a Runtime instances of Docker images.

Benefits of a Docker

Build your application once and use it in multiple environments without the need of building or configuring once again. The application built on dev environment guaranteed to work in prod environment.

Centralized Docker repository makes it very easy to store and retrieve. Moreover, you don’t need to build the image from scratch. You can always leverage existing image and go from there. The sharing of an image becomes very simple as well.

Version Control – You can always create next image and version control them.

Isolation – Every application works inside its own container and never interfere with other containers. If you no longer need an application, you can delete its container. Every container has it’s own resources hence there is going to be no challenge.

Security – The isolation ensures that the applications that are running on containers are completely segregated. The container cannot look into or have a provision to control processes running on other containers. This greatly enhances security.

Multi-cloud platforms/Portability – The image built on Amazon EC2 would very well be ported to Microsoft Azure.

Productivity – This is an implicit benefit of using Docker. The speed of development is much faster as the main focus is writing code and business over worrying extensively about deployment/testing.